When dealing with electronic mail communications that occur across language boundaries, there are two issues that come to the fore. The first is the ability of the computers to handle various languages. The second is the ability of the users of the computers to handle various languages.
Computers in general, and electronic mail more specifically, were nurtured in an environment that was largely centered around the English language. Resultantly early efforts in defining a set of characters to be used by computers were based on English. The first set of characters developed was the US-ASCII character set. This character set could be represented with 7 bits of data. A side effect of this 7 bit representation was the development of a mail transfer protocol called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol which supports only 7 bit data. The need to support the European languages, and the additional characters, relative to English, defined therein, caused a need for 8 bits of data to be used in representing an entire character set. The need to support Asian languages, with the large number of characters present in these languages, caused the required number of bits for representing these languages to grow such that 2 octets (8 bits/octet) were used to represent these character sets, and from this need developed yet more character sets. Although significant progress has been made in recent years to evolve to a unified standard, the fact remains that there are still various user agents that can only support one character set. The absence of a ubiquitous standard among user agents results in a variety of character set encoding be used to display text in a way that is appropriate for each language. Failure to match the proper character encoding with the corresponding text can render the information unviewable.
Typically, companies wishing to communicate with their customers will do so in a generic fashion. In such a case, the result is that every user of a company's system will be treated the same in an electronic communication from a company. A person in Poland will receive the same communication as a person in Japan. This can be undesirable in that communications are very language and culture sensitive. A generic message that is sent to all users of a system may be perfectly suited for one culture and alienate another culture to the point of hurting business in that country.
In a similar vane, there are times when it is desired to have information fed to the company. When things are sent to a representative of a company, one runs into a potential for the same cultural insensitive as was alluded to with respect to the generic emails.
There is a need to have a electronic mail system that can handle the disparate needs of various languages and cultures.